That's all good and fine if you're actually a contractor and your daily travel involves hauling around lots of tools and large hardware. Nobody's going to say people shouldn't drive trucks if they don't have a real use for them on a daily basis. But so many people (men, mostly) drive their oversized monster trucks to work every day to sit at a desk and code all day. And those trucks? Not a scratch on them. No, I don't think they've ever actually been used for construction purposes.
As for me, I don't need to get windows replaced every single day. If I do, I'll rent a truck for a day. Or even easier: have them delivered. If it's local it'll cost like $20, or about 0.05% of the cost of the gas I save annually by not driving a goddamn monster truck to work.
Right--there's no problem with taking a mathematical model and tweaking the parameters until it fits experimental results.
But when you do that, it means your model is dependent on some basic assumptions. In the case of string theories, a well-known parameter is the number of spacial dimensions. If a model happens to fit experimental evidence very well, but only if there are 11 spacial dimensions, that's all well and good. But that model is useless if the assumptions are false.
We might still be able to design experiments to discover whether extra dimensions exist. Right now they're not feasible, due to the amount of energy it would take to explore those depths. But it may be possible. Of there turn out to be enough extra dimensions to fit a string theory, then we can put a check next to that parameter saying that it's consistent with reality. And that's a mark in favor of the theory.
For the PS3 wireless has always been the default for the guitars. As others have noted, they're just generally better too--much much smoother to play. Since the buttons are flush with each other you can easily slide up and down the neck of the guitar, much more so with the separated buttons on the GH controller. The initial run of RB guitars were a little buggy, which might be what you're thinking of, but they've longs since worked out the kinks. Also, the lack of clicking is a godsend--it drives me crazy whenever I play GH.
I would support this, and I personally use Google Groups to access USENET at work. But I'd rather just take my lumps and be forced to find another way if it'll help Google pay more attention to this problem.
I haven't noticed any particular trouble with spam originating from Gmail, and Gmail has still been pretty good at filtering most of my spam.
But if you really want Google to do something about spam, go after them for their negligence on google groups. They've allowed the service to become almost unusable due to the amount of spam they allow through. For actual Google Groups it's not a big problem, but for USENET groups it is. Most people on USENET are just dropping anything coming from Google Groups outright. Any legitimate posts from Google Groups are considered an "acceptable loss" given the amount of godawful spam they allow through. It really cheeses me off that Google won't do something about it.
Fortunately, they are on the decline now. When I went to buy a car recently, the dealer was complaining about all the used SUVs coming in that they just couldn't get rid of.
I'm not really so sure of that though. On almost every major issue McCain has towed the Bush line, even it it means reversing on his previous policies (politicians do this all the time, and I don't hold it against them when they can provide a well-reasoned argument for why they changed their minds). On the war, the economy, and most social issues he'll only make things worse, not better. He's been gradually backing down on immigration, where previously he had been taking a principled stand against the majority of Republicans on this, for which I commended him. And on the environment, where he's tried to distance himself from Bush, he still doesn't really quite get it, and the fact that he's taken more money from the oil and coal industries than any other sitting senator does not exactly give me confidence.
Plus, from what I've seen of FFXIII so far, the game engine's graphics are good enough that the difference between it, and the prerendered cutscenes is not anywhere near as jarring as in previous games. It's actually sometimes almost hard to tell. It's just easier for them to animate more complicated scenes if it's prerendered, and they don't have two worry about how many polygons or textures they can have.
There were, in fact, black slave owners in the US, though not many. But there were blacks who came over from Africa and Europe as free men, and kept slaves just like most other people at the time who could afford to. I don't have any citations handy at the moment as I need to get back to work, but I just thought I should point that out, as it's the one flaw in your otherwise excellent posts on this thread.
I should add to this something that is often forgotten in these discussions: There is no singular "Theory of Evolution". That's simply a shorthand for the myriad theories that describe different aspects of how and why evolution occurs. That evolution occurs in the first place is generally not in question. I can understand that the general population would not necessarily find it as common-sensical as the scientific community, because they don't have as much direct exposure to the evidence as they have to say, the evidence that gravitational pull exists, and that what goes up must come down. But it's more or less similar to scientists.
However, as I said before, there are many theories concerning the hows and whys of evolution, some of which may be right, and some of which may be wrong. It's impossible for a single theory to explain everything that happened in development, as you suggested, "from protozoa to humans." It requires many theories in physics, chemistry, genetics, symbiosis, speciation, geology, and so on. It would be virtually impossible without a time machine and untold of amounts of observation to detail the exact, step by step evolution from prokaryotes to humans (and even that suggests that there's some sort of linear progression, which is not accurate). Regardless, evolution has not occurred in a vacuum.
Scientists don't "keep out" ID because it might prove them wrong. They ignore it because it adds nothing to the discussion of how evolution works. It merely provides a god of the gaps. If you're in some kind of hurry to understand exactly where humans came from, you're free to insert god where you want as an explanation for the parts we don't understand yet. But if scientists just threw up their hands and said, "we have no way of understanding this--I guess God just did it" you wouldn't even be typing on that computer of yours, and that assumes you were lucky enough to survive polio as a child.
Exactly. *Teaching* about religious is a good thing. If you really want kids to be able to make up their own minds, they should be allowed to learn something about all of the world's major religions, and even minor ones. But that's what theology classes are for. Some high schools, and certainly all universities have them. It has nothing to do with Biology, and just because the fundamental framework under which almost all modern biology operates conflicts with one religion's creation myth there's no reason it shouldn't be taught.
Of course it doesn't. Now, some of the founders were anti-religious in a sense. At least, many of them were wary of most of the large organized religions. But one of the major points of the US of A is that it should be a place where people are free to believe and worship whatever they want so far as it does not infringe on the rights of others.
String theory is interesting, actually, in that there are at least a few ideas for how it can be tested. For example, it could be possible using a particle accelerator to detect the effects of the extra dimensions predicted by string theory. The problem for string theory is that even though such a test might be possible, we don't have a high-enough energy acclerator to test it. As mentioned in the article, there are hopes that we might be able to find something with the LHC, but in reality it might require an impractically ginormous accelerator to really find evidence of strings.
Oh....nevermind...:/ Seriously though, I never understood why, on slashdot or all places, there are so many of them. Heck, even if you thought global climate change were a complete scam, wouldn't you at least be in favor of technological advancement? Who wouldn't want to move beyond 19th century technology like internal combustion engines and coal-fired power plants?
I do, however, agree that politicans shouldn't be in the business of setting education curriculum--that's definitely a slippery slope.
Perhaps it should, to an extent, to those people, and to the predatory lenders as well. The problem is that this is affecting the entire economy in adverse ways, and *something* has to be done to dig some of these people out to try to reduce the innocent bystanders.
I wouldn't underestimate Anonymous. Not that I have any idea what they could really do against scientology--like you said, it isn't some emo kid on MySpace.
However, while scientolgy has been somewhat effective against mainstream antagonists in the media, (I'm including Slashdot here) through legal threats and the like, they don't know what they're up against here.
And until now I was also in the "huh, I thought 'semantic web' was little more than a buzzword a some markup no one pays attention too. Didn't think it were possible to make any use of" camp.
Yeah, but then why even bring "God" into it at all? First of all, while the big bang is the beginning of the universe as we know it, I'm sure all that energy had to already exist, possibly from a previous universe. So regardless of where it came from and how long it's been there, it just is. For all we know it always has been. It's a limitation of the human imagination to assume there must be a "beginning". And if one is going to say, "Well, the origin of the universe is beyond our understanding, so god must have done it. Oh yeah, and god is beyond our understanding too," why bother with the "God" part? Why not just throw up our hands and say, "the universe is beyond or understanding?"
The whole "virgin" thing is a relatively recent phenomenon. When the New Testament was being translated from Hebrew to Greek they took to word "almah", generally referring to a young, unwed girl, and translated it to the Greek "parthenos" ("virgin"). So yeah, Jesus was more likely the bastard son of an unwed teen mommy.
Slashdot Mirror
I may have actually been there at the time. That, or this is just something he does normally anyways.
Argh. Above was me. Did not mean to be cowardly.
Yep, it's all in the name. It's the PATRIOT Act. You want to be a PATRIOT don't you??
Same thing with the ridiculous "Job-Killing Healthcare Law Repeal Act" or whatever they're calling it. You don't want to KILL JOBS do you???
It's in the name, so it must be true, right?
That's all good and fine if you're actually a contractor and your daily travel involves hauling around lots of tools and large hardware. Nobody's going to say people shouldn't drive trucks if they don't have a real use for them on a daily basis. But so many people (men, mostly) drive their oversized monster trucks to work every day to sit at a desk and code all day. And those trucks? Not a scratch on them. No, I don't think they've ever actually been used for construction purposes.
As for me, I don't need to get windows replaced every single day. If I do, I'll rent a truck for a day. Or even easier: have them delivered. If it's local it'll cost like $20, or about 0.05% of the cost of the gas I save annually by not driving a goddamn monster truck to work.
Right--there's no problem with taking a mathematical model and tweaking the parameters until it fits experimental results.
But when you do that, it means your model is dependent on some basic assumptions. In the case of string theories, a well-known parameter is the number of spacial dimensions. If a model happens to fit experimental evidence very well, but only if there are 11 spacial dimensions, that's all well and good. But that model is useless if the assumptions are false.
We might still be able to design experiments to discover whether extra dimensions exist. Right now they're not feasible, due to the amount of energy it would take to explore those depths. But it may be possible. Of there turn out to be enough extra dimensions to fit a string theory, then we can put a check next to that parameter saying that it's consistent with reality. And that's a mark in favor of the theory.
For the PS3 wireless has always been the default for the guitars. As others have noted, they're just generally better too--much much smoother to play. Since the buttons are flush with each other you can easily slide up and down the neck of the guitar, much more so with the separated buttons on the GH controller. The initial run of RB guitars were a little buggy, which might be what you're thinking of, but they've longs since worked out the kinks. Also, the lack of clicking is a godsend--it drives me crazy whenever I play GH.
I would support this, and I personally use Google Groups to access USENET at work. But I'd rather just take my lumps and be forced to find another way if it'll help Google pay more attention to this problem.
I haven't noticed any particular trouble with spam originating from Gmail, and Gmail has still been pretty good at filtering most of my spam.
But if you really want Google to do something about spam, go after them for their negligence on google groups. They've allowed the service to become almost unusable due to the amount of spam they allow through. For actual Google Groups it's not a big problem, but for USENET groups it is. Most people on USENET are just dropping anything coming from Google Groups outright. Any legitimate posts from Google Groups are considered an "acceptable loss" given the amount of godawful spam they allow through. It really cheeses me off that Google won't do something about it.
Fortunately, they are on the decline now. When I went to buy a car recently, the dealer was complaining about all the used SUVs coming in that they just couldn't get rid of.
I'm not really so sure of that though. On almost every major issue McCain has towed the Bush line, even it it means reversing on his previous policies (politicians do this all the time, and I don't hold it against them when they can provide a well-reasoned argument for why they changed their minds). On the war, the economy, and most social issues he'll only make things worse, not better. He's been gradually backing down on immigration, where previously he had been taking a principled stand against the majority of Republicans on this, for which I commended him. And on the environment, where he's tried to distance himself from Bush, he still doesn't really quite get it, and the fact that he's taken more money from the oil and coal industries than any other sitting senator does not exactly give me confidence.
Plus, from what I've seen of FFXIII so far, the game engine's graphics are good enough that the difference between it, and the prerendered cutscenes is not anywhere near as jarring as in previous games. It's actually sometimes almost hard to tell. It's just easier for them to animate more complicated scenes if it's prerendered, and they don't have two worry about how many polygons or textures they can have.
There were, in fact, black slave owners in the US, though not many. But there were blacks who came over from Africa and Europe as free men, and kept slaves just like most other people at the time who could afford to. I don't have any citations handy at the moment as I need to get back to work, but I just thought I should point that out, as it's the one flaw in your otherwise excellent posts on this thread.
I should add to this something that is often forgotten in these discussions: There is no singular "Theory of Evolution". That's simply a shorthand for the myriad theories that describe different aspects of how and why evolution occurs. That evolution occurs in the first place is generally not in question. I can understand that the general population would not necessarily find it as common-sensical as the scientific community, because they don't have as much direct exposure to the evidence as they have to say, the evidence that gravitational pull exists, and that what goes up must come down. But it's more or less similar to scientists.
However, as I said before, there are many theories concerning the hows and whys of evolution, some of which may be right, and some of which may be wrong. It's impossible for a single theory to explain everything that happened in development, as you suggested, "from protozoa to humans." It requires many theories in physics, chemistry, genetics, symbiosis, speciation, geology, and so on. It would be virtually impossible without a time machine and untold of amounts of observation to detail the exact, step by step evolution from prokaryotes to humans (and even that suggests that there's some sort of linear progression, which is not accurate). Regardless, evolution has not occurred in a vacuum.
Scientists don't "keep out" ID because it might prove them wrong. They ignore it because it adds nothing to the discussion of how evolution works. It merely provides a god of the gaps. If you're in some kind of hurry to understand exactly where humans came from, you're free to insert god where you want as an explanation for the parts we don't understand yet. But if scientists just threw up their hands and said, "we have no way of understanding this--I guess God just did it" you wouldn't even be typing on that computer of yours, and that assumes you were lucky enough to survive polio as a child.
Exactly. *Teaching* about religious is a good thing. If you really want kids to be able to make up their own minds, they should be allowed to learn something about all of the world's major religions, and even minor ones. But that's what theology classes are for. Some high schools, and certainly all universities have them. It has nothing to do with Biology, and just because the fundamental framework under which almost all modern biology operates conflicts with one religion's creation myth there's no reason it shouldn't be taught.
Of course it doesn't. Now, some of the founders were anti-religious in a sense. At least, many of them were wary of most of the large organized religions. But one of the major points of the US of A is that it should be a place where people are free to believe and worship whatever they want so far as it does not infringe on the rights of others.
String theory is interesting, actually, in that there are at least a few ideas for how it can be tested. For example, it could be possible using a particle accelerator to detect the effects of the extra dimensions predicted by string theory. The problem for string theory is that even though such a test might be possible, we don't have a high-enough energy acclerator to test it. As mentioned in the article, there are hopes that we might be able to find something with the LHC, but in reality it might require an impractically ginormous accelerator to really find evidence of strings.
Oh....nevermind... :/
Seriously though, I never understood why, on slashdot or all places, there are so many of them. Heck, even if you thought global climate change were a complete scam, wouldn't you at least be in favor of technological advancement? Who wouldn't want to move beyond 19th century technology like internal combustion engines and coal-fired power plants?
I do, however, agree that politicans shouldn't be in the business of setting education curriculum--that's definitely a slippery slope.
Er, reduce harm to innocent bystanders, that is.
Perhaps it should, to an extent, to those people, and to the predatory lenders as well. The problem is that this is affecting the entire economy in adverse ways, and *something* has to be done to dig some of these people out to try to reduce the innocent bystanders.
I wouldn't underestimate Anonymous. Not that I have any idea what they could really do against scientology--like you said, it isn't some emo kid on MySpace.
However, while scientolgy has been somewhat effective against mainstream antagonists in the media, (I'm including Slashdot here) through legal threats and the like, they don't know what they're up against here.
Actually, no. That was my first thought too +__+
And until now I was also in the "huh, I thought 'semantic web' was little more than a buzzword a some markup no one pays attention too. Didn't think it were possible to make any use of" camp.
Yeah, but then why even bring "God" into it at all? First of all, while the big bang is the beginning of the universe as we know it, I'm sure all that energy had to already exist, possibly from a previous universe. So regardless of where it came from and how long it's been there, it just is. For all we know it always has been. It's a limitation of the human imagination to assume there must be a "beginning". And if one is going to say, "Well, the origin of the universe is beyond our understanding, so god must have done it. Oh yeah, and god is beyond our understanding too," why bother with the "God" part? Why not just throw up our hands and say, "the universe is beyond or understanding?"
My mistake, the mistranslation was actually from a prophesy in the OT.
Whoa, lay off the eggnog yourself there pal.
:P)
Actually, I'm at work right now, you know, working (I'm a Jew...a lonely Jew...)
Also, I shut off all my gear before I leave the house, except for my file server since, you know, it's a server.
Put up all the lights you want (especially if they're LEDs), and nobody's going to stop you, not even me. So lay off the invective.
(P.S. My desktop has a 350W power supply and only one 22" LCD
The whole "virgin" thing is a relatively recent phenomenon. When the New Testament was being translated from Hebrew to Greek they took to word "almah", generally referring to a young, unwed girl, and translated it to the Greek "parthenos" ("virgin"). So yeah, Jesus was more likely the bastard son of an unwed teen mommy.